


Arithmetics

by CobaltKicks



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Beware Spoilers, Gen, Post- Into Darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 04:11:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1065600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CobaltKicks/pseuds/CobaltKicks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carol Marcus learned relatively early in life that the combination of being pretty, intelligent and having an influential father made her practically invincible. She hasn't stopped for breath since.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arithmetics

Carol Marcus learned relatively early in life that the combination of being pretty, intelligent and having an influential father made her practically invincible. She hasn't stopped for breath since.

She uses all three to get to arrive into the sphere of influence around Jim Kirk. She's slightly disappointed the boy hero himself doesn't see through her all-white smile, but she chalks it up to the macrocosmic stress of the situation (she even invents a friendship with one of the nurses listed as serving on the Enterprise five months ago to test this theory. She's right, of course) and a little guiltily adds it to her repertoire of manipulation to Kirk. Naturally, his second-in-command catches her metaphorical lack of reflection (Carol suspects this is Kirk's first strength: the men and women who have his back, and his first talent: attracting the brightest and best creatures of the galaxy to his side and keeping them there) and for the first time, has to use her IQ count only to achieve her ends.

(Suddenly, they aren’t what she wants at all. She finds herself, for the first time, on someone's, other than her own, side. Suddenly, Carol has walked straight into Jim Kirk's sphere of influence and recollects herself among those lost creatures pulled to his side).

(At Jim Kirk's side, she watches, among other things, her father's head crushed between the hands of a man out of time).

 

She spends five days recovering ("Difficult break," the doctor had told her, meaning the bone had not only fractured in three different places, but splintered and torn muscle tissue), staring at the bland ceiling of Starfleet Medical, wondering how far her influential father's slippery ethics and more slippery sense of reality had influenced the one person who, arguably, had spent the largest percentage of their time with him.

("And I don't believe that the man who raised me..." She told him. In that bed in Starfleet Medical, Carol takes time trying to figure out if she was telling the truth or trying to raise humanity in the admiral with her almost-crude emotional blackmail).

(She counts up each worrisome thought that she had tucked away when she saw the next, newest, and increasingly destructive technology blueprints under her father's security clearance.)

(It has been said that we ignore in others what we find most distasteful in ourselves.)

Carol finds the number she reaches distasteful. It is both encouraging and disgusting.

 

On the sixth day, she is visited by two admirals and a psychiatrist. She looks concerned and traumatized and ascertains that even without her father the colour of her hair is enough to make men overlook the fact that they address her as "Dr." .

Carol tells the right truths in all the right places, demonstrates her innocence in being privy to her father's manipulation of the Augments, her intelligence in her suspicion about the torpedoes (and the lack of intensive questioning leads her to further suspicions: that they have already scheduled a disciplinary court for her months and months into the future, or that Commander Spock has submitted a report that fills in all of the gaps about her motives and methods of stowing away aboard the _Enterprise_ ).

She knows she's alright when she's given an unsatisfied sigh and a settled look. "Listen, Dr. Marcus. We have our hands full currently trying to fix the damage created by Singh without having to figure out where it all went wrong and how to stop it ever happening again at the same time. Right now, we need ever officer we can have, and the command at HQ is a nest of suspicion and protest."

_You're our most valuable insight into Admiral Marcus and we're not letting you go anytime soon._

Fine, Carol thinks. I will be good and you'll have to give me want I ask for later. It seems her ability to manipulate is still Carol's greatest asset. The only difference is that her pride in it has plummeted into minus numbers.

"If I may, sir, I think James Kirk will resolve the last two for you when he's recovered."

She gets a tired smile and Carol is left painting her questions and emotions across the featureless ceiling. Why the hell am I a specialist in advanced weaponry? Is there anything left of me when you subtract Alexander Marcus? Who was he, and what happens now?

It takes time, but she resolves each.

 

It's easy enough is stealing a crutch and escaping the attention of the medical officers who are being stretched too thin. Harder, is finding Kirk. Doubtless someone's watching what she accesses nowadays so she does things the old-fashioned way.

It's a few hours, a couple of shots of pain medication and two instances of hiding in supply cupboards that she reaches her destination. McCoy materializes as soon as she's within fifteen meters of Kirk's ward, but she convinces in a hushed and brief argument.

("Is he awake?" 

"Yes."

"Is he bored out of his mind?"

Hesitation.  "Look, -"

"You can run a security scan on me, Doctor. I haven’t got any hyposprays of arsenic hidden on my person.")

She had even broken character to get some flowers, but according to the good doctor, Kirk was allergic to that breed of orchid, so they were confiscated, presumably destined to incineration. All McCoy's Southern manners don't grace their exchange now. His concern for Kirk rivaled Commander Spock's, in a much more human manner.

(Carol likes McCoy for his dedication, his stability, for knowing who he is and what he stands for).

(She feels more sorry every day for the suspicion and animosity her faked credentials would most probably cause between the crew and her in the future).

 

Kirk's got his face six inches from a PADD when Carol hobbles through the doorway of his room, surrounded with the most advanced medical technology available at HQ. He is a miracle, she thinks, a miracle and a legend, and tries harder than anything to show everyone who fails to touch him that he is also a man.

"Captain," Carol lingers just inside, incase Kirk decides to throw the PADD at her in residual anger. She doubts it, but her evasive capacities are greatly compromised by the "difficult break". "How are you?"

"So you've finally escaped surveillance to come see this medical miracle?" The captain's evasive capacities don't seem to have taken such a blow, however.

"I'm glad you're.... alright," She replies. The word _"alive"_ makes its presence known, but Carol exorcises it in consideration.

"So am I, surprisingly enough," He gestures to the chair, like, _come sit down, I can feel this conversation happing already._ As she limps over, he adds,"I see you lost the accent."

"My mother was British. I was trying to be authentic."

"Anything else I should know?"

"I've never met Christine Chapel, and you never slept with her."

He looks away, like he’s about to degrade everything with an “I thought so”.

Outside the window rises the San Francisco jungle and the constant reminder of the physical metaphor of the wrecking ball written across the sky in the mumuration of rescue shuttles, worming their way over the skyline towards the wreckage site. The debris field was something like 1,700 km in radius. It would take almost a decade to clear away the physical remnants of the Destroyer. That kind of starship, warship, wasn’t built for atmospheric entry. Carol should know.

She should _have_ known, she had acted too late, too late.

Carol looks for distraction in Kirk’s eyes, but they are glassy and reflective. “Have the admiralty been in to see you yet?”    

“For all of the five minutes they could spare anyone for.”

Kirk likes to pretend he doesn’t do sombre or multi-layer conversations. Carol didn’t know then, about the fracture in time and the way in which their lives had meant to be so different, so much worse, so much better, but in retrospect, she could see it. The distortion of a different life finally clearing away and James Kirk fitting together in a neo-phantom of the man he was supposed to be- who didn’t gain the Enterprise by premature chance, and lost her for the same reasons; the real meaning of the rank and term and simply the _word, Captain_ settled heavy across every inch of him.

(The man who could bear the weight.)

She buries her fingers in the sheets and says, “Genius orphans of infamous fathers continuously underestimated because of their looks all together, eh?” And it takes more courage than she’ll ever admit. Burning bridges to build in their place, and all that.

_Question: What do we do now?_

He smiles, at last. Only human, Carol reminds herself.

“That was a very British thing to say.”

_Answer: We help as much as we can, for as long as we can, we build the tallest walls and the strongest safeguards, we heal and wait for Earth to heal, and when that’s done, we take the longest mission away in space possible. And we blame ourselves, over and over, because we made damn sure the ones who were really responsible aren’t here any longer to answer for this._

“McCoy’s gonna eat me for dinner if I stick around much longer,” she says and tries not to laugh at the dumb face he pulls.

He no doubt watches her hobble back through the doorway, because he says, “Sure, the galaxy needs a little more Prime Directive and a few less torpedoes, but it sure as hell would suffer if we let minds as charming as ours go to absolute waste.”

Under the featureless ceiling of Starfleet Medical, Carol Marcus ascertains two things: her first experience of total honesty and, that if growing up hard and fast is endlessly painful and a twist of bitter, it doesn’t have to be lonely.

 

**Author's Note:**

> AN: thanks for reading! love you lots~ special thanks to Kestrel Blue for looking this over and to hipsterdarcy for existing and being practically amazing.


End file.
